


I had never known love

by CryptidPrynt



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Graphic Depictions of Illness, I love him, M/M, Minor Character Death, Mutual Pining, Past Lives, Plague, Romantic Soulmates, Soulmates, Supernatural Illnesses, Telepathic Communication, hope is a little BRAT in this, these tags are hilarious in retrospect
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-17
Updated: 2020-08-17
Packaged: 2021-03-06 08:02:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25680055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CryptidPrynt/pseuds/CryptidPrynt
Summary: Statement of Hope, regarding the beginning of his relationship with Breekon
Relationships: Breekon/Hope
Comments: 8
Kudos: 37





	I had never known love

**Author's Note:**

> based on a conversation i was having with @skelelephant, in this household we make up our own favorite character's backstories  
> just pretend he's giving a statement for some reason I was too tired to think of an excuse

I did not know what love was. I never knew how it felt to gain something I didn't know I missed. But now that knowledge is with me always, and I suppose I shall share that knowledge with you. 

It is only sensible that I start from the beginning. Yes, the _annoying_ beginning. I don't care if you don't want to hear it; you asked for a statement so I shall give you one.  
I was hardly a tolerable child, just as loud and violent as I am so well known for now. My behavior only worsened as I grew, and oh did I grow. Even as a young lad I loomed over my peers. I was a snarling, feral thing, hungry to terrorize the innocent teenagers forced to be in my presence. But I mellowed slightly as I reached adulthood. The hunger was there, and I was still vicious, but I found I needed only to exist within the space to feed on their discomfort. However, there was then a new hunger. A hunger I could not name settled in my chest behind my heart. I did not think about that hunger.

I did not know what love was, then. I had never understood that warm softness others spoke so wistfully about. What I knew of the world was cold and mean, no room for comfort. I did not know of love, and I did not care to.  
Until he appeared.  
I never had a name for the hunger that lingered in my chest. It was not obvious, nor was it particularly strong. But the moment I laid eyes on Breekon I was all but _starving_. The man we worked for told me his name, though I can't remember it now, and said we were to work together. Partners, so he called us. Breekon had not said a word the entire time, yet he stared me down with the eyes of a hawk, and that hunger in my heart sang so loud.

Breekon was tall, nearly half a foot taller than me. I knew the only reason we were paired together was that they thought he was big enough to steer me out of trouble. He was the only person bigger than me, which you think would have intimidated me, as our overseers had hoped it would. It did not in the slightest, rather, it enraptured me. I was not used to people looking down at me, being stronger than me. It was a fun change.  
He was not a talkative man. For at least a week I had not heard him utter a sound, no matter how much I chittered or how many questions I asked him. The rabid desire I felt gnawing at my ribcage was maddening and craved his notice so desperately. I was greedy for Breekon's attention, so I would be as obnoxious as possible in the hopes of getting him to just _look at me_. I would make jokes, and sometimes I'd get a huff. I would get snappy at other people who tried to turn his attention away. I would get into scraps and shouting matches and he would yank me away like a mother cat grabbing its kitten by the scruff. It was childish, but it worked.  
And then one day he spoke. I was pestering him, as I usually did, but he was not having me that day. My focus locked onto some small, spiffy-looking gentleman, dressed nicely and looking like he was in a hurry. He bumped into my arm as he scrambled past, and I took it as an opportunity to let off energy and I snapped at the man. Asked him where he thought he was going, what he was in such a hurry for, did he think he could just push everyone out the way like that? The poor fool stuttered and apologized, but I was not satisfied. I grabbed him by the shoulder, prepared to break it if I so pleased when Breekon spoke behind me. "Enough." He said, in a growling voice deeper than my own. I stopped dead and turned around with wide eyes to see him staring knives into me. His eyes told me to let go, and I did. I let go of the small gentleman and walked wordlessly back to the carriage and he stared at me the whole way, silent and stern. He got back into the carriage and we wordlessly continued on. For the rest of the day, my heart was silent. Satisfied.

After that I began getting him to talk a little bit more. He still didn't say much, only saying a word or two at a time, but he always answered when I asked him things. I think he saw how it settled me, how I would stop fussing if he said something, and he figured it was better than dealing with my usual annoyances. I couldn't tell you when we started to become friends, but after a while, we were comfortable with one another's company. I didn't feel so ravenous, and he would speak in full sentences. We became a hard-working pair.  
Although I mellowed out, the hunger never ceased. In fact, it only grew, filling my chest with a deep ache that I could not understand. I was too afraid to analyze it, too afraid to become self-aware of how I truly felt. All I understood was that I felt better when I was with Breekon. I felt better when he was paying attention to me, speaking to me, listening to me talk. It felt so nice... so rewarding.  
Desiring his notice of me still led me to poor decisions. I would start trouble just to feel him fuss over me and call me a fool and insist that no, he clean my wounds because my hands were unsteady and I couldn't see my face. I lived for those moments, where he cared for me. I devoured them.

He cared for me like that often. It was my fault, of course; I would get into fights I knew I'd lose, and he would feign his concern as annoyance yet still insist I let him clean me up himself. It was almost routine, to be honest with you. His tenderness was what my heart craved so dearly, the feeling of his hands so gently tending to me felt divine.  
His doting came more often to me after some time. More often and more by his own free will. I think he had the same hunger in his heart, now that I think about it. He just expressed it differently. While I was persistent in getting his undivided attention, he did not beg for mine. Rather, he just stared at me, almost looking like he was trying to understand something, something he'd figure out if he just looked hard enough. He stared at me with such intensity, a gaze that spoke to me in whispered words I could hear in the back of my mind. I know he heard me say things, too. That became a phenomenon between the two of us. We'd move together wordlessly, already aware of what the other was going to do. At first, we didn't speak of it. We didn't want to have an awkward heart-to-heart and ruin what we had going on. But the whispers I'd hear in the back of my mind turned into clear, coherent words as we spent more time together. He heard them too, I could see it in his eyes. We would peer into one another, and we would hear the words, and we would both startle ourselves and turn away. We never spoke of it.  
There was something deeper, there. Within the words we projected to one another was a reason for the desperate aching need I had for Breekon that resided in my chest, and if I thought hard enough I could unlock it.

I did end up figuring it out, actually. It was quite funny in retrospect, I hit my head after getting my jaw punched out of place. I was in and out of consciousness and felt so incredibly far away from the world. My eyes were heavy and reality was blurry, but when I did occasionally open them, there were fuzzy visions of Breekon's face looming over me. It was not always his face, though. His face would melt into the face of someone else, a few times. In my dazed state, I did not consider it coincidence or just the concussion twisting my vision. I knew it meant something. My mind was full of incoherent thoughts and feelings and memories that weren't mine, suddenly placed in my head with no warning. Memories I had of Breekon, from someone that was and yet was not me. Not _really_ with him, of course, but no matter the face he wore in these memories that were not my own, it was still him every time.  
My heart ached. It was pounding. It was throwing all these puzzle pieces at me, screaming for me to put them together. Screaming for me to understand, to remember for myself. To wake up.  
That last part was very clear. A voice echoed in my conscience to wake up. It was not Breekon's voice, though I could hear him speaking far off in the real world. The voice in my head was my own, but at the same time, it wasn't. It was my own voice from a separate entity, an entity that felt the same as the aching in my heart. It felt so angry, so tired, so brutally _desperate_ for me to just _wake up._ I couldn't understand what it meant. The memories and screaming and feelings were too much to bear at once. I think I must've started to cry wherever my body was, I felt hot tears roll down my cheeks into my ears, I hadn't even realized they laid me down. Through the static mess, I heard Breekon's gentle coo and a thumb brush over my cheek. He hushed me quietly and I felt his breath in my ear. It was incredible how quickly I stopped shaking and quieted down. The voice in my head wanted me to reach for him, to hold him, but it hurt too much to move. I think I must have grabbed some part of him, his bicep or his leg, and I squeezed. He hushed me some more and comforted me in words I couldn't make out. The screaming was still loud, but whenever he spoke, his voice cut through and brought me ease. He must've understood, telepathically or not, and he kept reassuring me until I finally drifted away into sleep.

Can't say I remember much after that mess. I recall being told the guy I got pummeled by was found bleeding out in a horse paddock. It wasn't hard to guess who did it, especially when Breekon came to check on me with bandaged knuckles. He looked after me by himself for the rest of that week. Not a soul was permitted to bother me but him, a very strict rule that nobody was brave enough to disobey. I think I started feeling like myself again near the end of the week. I was throwing little quips at him again, teasing him about his busted hands, half-joking that I'd kiss them better for him. He let me, once. Sometimes I'd whine about him making my cut lip feel better. Usually, he'd just scoff and turn away. He did, though, sometimes. I remembered those.

I still didn't know what to make of my revelation, though. The voice in my head still screamed, still ached, still reached for Breekon, but there was no explanation as to why. It stressed me greatly, and he took immense concern about my behavior. What could I have told him? That I remembered him from what I can only assume is a past life? That something in my soul woke up and threw a fit over him? Would I have told him to _wake up?_ I couldn't talk about it. He wouldn't understand.  
It was a few days after getting back into work that I realized I missed him. It made zero sense, and yet it was exactly how I felt. How I could miss someone when I spent every day with them was beyond me, and yet my heart cried it out with such confidence. It was sure. He would be right in front of me and still, I thought I missed him. He tried so hard to understand what little I could tell him without sounding insane, but he still couldn't grasp it. I think it hurt him seeing me so distressed but unable to understand why. The concept was so abstract that no amount of telepathy could properly explain whatever the hell was going on.  
However, I think he felt it too. Maybe he couldn't quite get it just yet, but something inside him yearned just as painfully. He'd hug me a little tighter, kiss me a little longer, search a little deeper into my eyes for some sudden explanation. He probably wouldn't get it unless he hit his head, though. I knew that, but I wasn't preparing to sock him just to activate what we were both looking for.  
Somehow, though, he figured it out. I don't know how he did it, he never told me, but one evening he ran to me and told me he loved me. He told me he understood, he gets it now, he knows what we are. "Soulmates" was the term I believe he used. I didn't care what word he called it, the screaming that filled my mind came to a crescendo, and I could think of nothing but to tell him I missed him. He understood what I meant, that time, and he missed me too. We spent that evening holding each other and whispering sweet nothings. I understood the gravity of love, then. Looking at Breekon made it make perfect sense. 

We were a hell of a mortal duo for a while there. Absolutely nobody could explain our sudden inseparability, and it frightened them a little bit. We liked it when it frightened them. We started speaking in sync together, I would begin and he would finish as we so _love_ to do now. Sometimes we'd go back and forth just to freak people out. They all wondered what went on between us, but we never told them. They stopped seeing us as two people together and instead as one huge, terrifying thing that came in the form of two men. The fear they emitted was intoxicating, and we took it all.

And then I got sick. Of course I got sick, we handled dead bodies, and I would play with and prod at them like they were rag dolls, like it was a joke. Of course I got sick.  
It felt cruel to kill me that quickly. We had only a few weeks completed together before I caught that dastardly illness. It was a peculiar thing, that plague. Constantly mutating and killing people in new, more disturbing ways. It certainly wasn't natural, what caught me. It was unlike any disease you've heard of. It did not behave like a regular sickness, putting terrible things inside of your body to kill you. It hollowed you. I remember so vividly ripping some poor dead peasant open to feed his pieces to the pigs, and the ax cut through him clean. No blood, no resistance. I pried him open and found nothing but an empty body and his skeleton. That disease was nothing normal, turning your skin thick and rubbery and carving you out like a pumpkin and ripping your vocal cords to shreds. It hurt, too. Oh, how it hurt. It was not a searing pain that causes you to whimper and wail, but a pain so seething and deep you can't even breathe let alone scream.  
Breekon did not leave my side as I withered away. I would have told him to save himself, but I knew there was no life for him without me there. He wouldn't have listened, anyway. Whatever time he didn't spend laying and suffering with me, he spent looking for a cure. There was none, of course, but that did not stop him. He was gone for a whole day, once. Wherever I don't know, but when he came back, he came back with a book. A hardcover leatherback, with uncomfortably thick paper and writing I couldn't read. To be honest, I didn't think he could read it either. He could, though, and he told me it would fix me, make me new. The only catch was that I had to die first.

Would any sane person have listened to him? No, of course not. But did I? Of course I did. I trusted him with what little life I had. He explained to me what the book told him and how he found it and how it would work, but I didn't retain anything. Something about a new face granting a new life, I didn't care. I let him talk and he gave me one last kiss goodbye, and finally, I died.

I don't quite recall what it felt like to be dead. All I remember is my body feeling numb, so wonderfully numb, and then I awoke. It wasn't sudden, I just woke up as if from normal sleep. My body felt hollow, as I suppose I should have expected. Breekon was sitting in a chair next to our bed, the book in his lap, a blood-soaked knife in one hand, and holding my own in the other. His head rested upon my thigh, and the dark circles under his eyes suggested I must've been gone for a few days at least.  
It was then I noticed my face felt strange. It felt like it... fit wrong. It didn't hurt, just felt too stretched out and tight. I felt refreshed, though, funny enough. Like a brand new man, if you will. I eased myself up with my free arm and stared down at Breekon. There was blood covering the floor next to his chair, and I think there may have been a human foot poking out from under the bed. My head was empty, however, and I had no mind for what atrocities he committed to bring me back. I reached my left hand over and gently pushed my fingers through his messy, unclean hair. I squeezed his hand to try and rouse him gently. He stirred, and I tried to speak. My throat was shot, and what came out of my mouth sounded raspy and hoarse, yet I still called him my love with as much tenderness as I always do. He awoke, and he turned his head up slightly to look at me. His face was struck with the most subtle horror at first, which concerned me a bit, but his horror turned to joy and tears began to well up in his eyes. We held each other for a little while. He wept into my shoulder and I realized I forgot how to breathe. I had no lungs to do so, so perhaps it didn't matter. Not many things mattered anymore, I was alive.

He told me how he spent three days looking for the perfect face. He wanted to find someone that looked nearly identical to me, to make things easier, and that I could pick out my own face after this was over. I had no idea what he meant, but I listened anyway. He taught me how to read the strange book he found, and how it gave me my life back. I took it in and read it over a couple of times while he slept next to me in bed. I was to replace his face, apparently. Not the most mortifying thing I've done, if you'd believe me, but certainly up there at the time.  
After a few days of scouting for a face that looked like Breekon's, he started to fall ill. I felt horrible knowing the exact pain he was dealing with, but being able to do nothing to ease it. I could at least soothe his worries of resurrection and tell him it wouldn't hurt. He seemed to take comfort in that. At last, I held him close to me as he took his final breaths and died in my arms. I shouldn't have cried, I knew there was no need. I knew I was bringing him back. I knew he died as comfortably as he could. I cried anyway.  
I hunted down his doppelganger and killed him quickly. It wasn't simple, dragging a huge, dead man back to our bedroom without anyone noticing, but nobody liked to question us anymore. The ritual I had to perform was simple. I would peel the face of the stranger, and place it over Breekon's. The passage I was required to read from was... quite vague and metaphorical, but in some strange way, it made sense.

**He was corrupted. His body diseased and decrepit, eyes so sunken and lips so cracked and pale his face is unrecognizable. As his conscience fades out of existence, he succumbs to The Rot. But an unrecognizable face is not what The Rot desires. The Rot does not care about who you are and aren't. Instead, he shall never look like himself ever again. With a new face comes a new life, and with a new life, he shall take many faces. With a new face comes many new names, and with new names, he loses his real self to the nature of a Stranger, and all he knew will look upon him and say I Do Not Know You.**

Somehow the wind was knocked out of me, even though I lacked lungs. I fell back on the floor, covered in blood, and looked frantically at Breekon. The stranger's face had melted with his, looking frightening and uncanny. I stared in awe. Somehow the divine powers of fuck all managed to fuse his face with someone else's. I kneeled in front of the bed and held his cold hand. He didn't move for a long time. It could have been hours, days even, and I stared at him the entire time. Sometime later, his eyes fluttered open and he appeared to be taking in the new sensations. He looked around the room, and his eyes fell on me. I greeted him with a smile, and a kiss hello.

If nobody could understand us then, they certainly didn't now. We walked out of our room however many mornings later and acted as if nothing happened. We knew they would remain confused and terrified, and we adored it.  
I'm sure you get it now. I became quite fond of changing my face; it felt liberating to look nothing like me. We gained knowledge of the fears but cared not about what gods there were to consume us with love. We loved each other, and that is all we desire.

I had never known love. I never felt the warm embrace of the being the other half of my heart belonged to. But now that feeling is with me always, and I wish nothing but to share it with you.

**Author's Note:**

> hello! hopefully this was comprehensible! this fic is. basically just how I think the Beginning Beginning of Breekon & Hope happened with a little bit of yearning thrown in there to taste. love these fellas so much


End file.
